Staff at the Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London
Margaret Reynolds

Dr Margaret Reynolds, MA (Oxford) PhD (London)
Reader

Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8552
email: m.l.reynolds@qmul.ac.uk

Research interests:

  • C18-21 literature
  • Poetry
  • Transmission of Classics
  • Imagination of adoption
'The Sappho Companion' by Margaret Reynolds
'The Sappho Companion' by Margaret Reynolds

Margaret Reynolds works on literature from the eighteenth century to the present day, especially poetry and especially the Victorian period. In The Sappho History (2003), she traced the transmission of the works and images of the ancient Greek poet as they appear in the works of Mary Robinson, ST Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, Baudelaire, Swinburne, HD, and Virginia Woolf. The Sappho Companion (2000) is an anthology of Sappho and Sappho-related writings. Her work on late-modern representations of the Classics also includes her essays on the operas derived from adaptations of the Medea of Euripedes and the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Her interest in contemporary literature also appears in her series (with Jonathan Noakes) Vintage Living Texts. This currently includes 14 titles on authors ranging from Margaret Atwood to Salman Rushdie.

Margaret Reynolds is the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Adventures in Poetry, now in its 11th series. She broadcasts on music (especially opera) and poetry for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 and for television channels BBC 2 and BBC 4. She writes and presents regularly for Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the English National Opera. She has a weekly column on classic books in the Times on Saturdays. In May 2005 she gave the British Academy's Warton Lecture in English Poetry on 'The Child in Poetry: Lostlings, Foundlings and Changelings'.

Publications:

'The Sappho History' by Margaret Reynolds
'The Sappho History' by Margaret Reynolds

(Recent publications)

The Sappho Companion (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000)

Vintage Living Texts: The Essential Guide,14 titles (with Jonathan Noakes): Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, AS Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Roddy Doyle, Susan Hill, Sebastian Faulks, Ian McEwan, Jeanette Winterson, American Fiction, Martin Amis, Louis de Bernieres, John Fowles: (London: Vintage, 2002-)

The Sappho History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003)

'I am Medea, or, Why is Medea a Woman?', in Medea in Performance ed by Edith Hall, Fiona Mcintosh, and Oliver Taplin(Oxford: Legenda, 2003)

'Agamemnon - Speaking the Unspeakable' in Agamemnon in Performance, ed by Edith Hall, Fiona Mcintosh, and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

'Lostlings, Foundlings and Changelings', Proceedings of the British Academy' (2006)

Editor of George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Penguin, 2007) (forthcoming)